His absence hurts because He is good

Does contemplating God's goodness make you feel better or worse?
I was chatting last night to a christian sister, who is having a bit of a hard time, and as she turns to the scriptures and thinks about the God of promise, it simply makes her feel worse. Where is the fulfilment of those promises? Why are things so bad? She was worried that she might be losing her trust in God.

In Psalm 77, Asaph asks the same questions. He cries out to God, refusing to be comforted. He remembers God's former deeds, the wonders of the exodus, redeeming the children of Jacob and Joseph. God's fearsome rule of the deep, the storm, the seperation of the waters, and God's presence with his flock through Moses and Aaron. Yet it is God who distresses him.
“Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favourable?
Has his steadfast love forever ceased?
Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” v7-9

Disappointment and crying out to God is biblical. We do God no honour by pretending that we can do without his redemption. We honour God's goodness by crying out in its absence in the world. Even as Christians, looking back to the heady events of Jesus resurrection, spur us to ask, where is that resurrection now?


“That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present”
Moltmann Theology of Hope pp21


God of goodness and life, where are you? We remember your power, your amazing promise, your world shaking Son, and it hurts us. Where is your mercy for the world? The compassion for your people? We eagerly await. We painfully wait. We wait hoping and remembering. Come Lord Jesus, come.